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The Visitor (episode)
After Sisko's apparent death, Jake is unable to deal with the loss. Summary "The Visitor" begins in an unusual location: on Earth, in a house on the Louisiana bayou near New Orleans. It is dark and stormy outside as an elderly Jake Sisko sits down in front of a fire. Soon, there comes a knock at the door and Jake answers, revealing a young woman looking for refuge from the downpour. After a few minutes of idle conversation the visitor reveals that she, in fact, is a writer and is looking for the writer Jake Sisko. Confirming that Jake is who she is talking to, she cuts to the chase and asks, very promptly, why he stopped writing. Taking a moment, Jake responds that he stopped writing, not because of any reason or recourse, but because of an event that happened to him when he was 18 years old. His father, Benjamin Sisko had died. Apparently, when Jake was younger in the year 2372 (sometime between Stardate 49011.4 and 49066.5) he lived on Space Station Deep Space 9, where his father was the Captain. In a rare event that happens only every 50 years, the Bajoran wormhole was going to undergo an ‘inversion’. During this inversion rare anomalies and temporal fluctuations were going to occur, creating an spectacle that one would not want to miss. Jake was working on a particularly difficult piece of prose at this time and was struggling with it when his father asked him to come along on the ''Defiant'' to watch. When the wormhole began inverting, it caused a malfunction on the Defiant's Engineering deck, and Benjamin went see it, followed by Jake. The warp core began to go critical from an energy flux. Benjamin Sisko was able to stop the core from rupturing but an energy discharge almost struck Jake. When Ben pushed Jake out of the way, he was hit instead and disappeared, thus being considered dead. Following this, the Bajorans mourned the loss of the Emissary of the Prophets and consoled Jake for almost a year until Benjamin reappeared for a few moments while Jake was asleep in bed. After his father disappeared again, Jake tried to explain what had happened to Dax, who agreed to scan for any anomalies. She picked up a slight variance but disregarded it and told Jake it was only a dream. A few months later, Jake found his father in a hallway on DS9 and was physically able to touch him. Taking him immediately to sickbay, they discovered that Ben was caught in a temporal inversion, falling in and out of sync with normal time. Trying to save him as he shifts, Jake loses his father again but has hope that he is out there somewhere. Years pass, and through grief and hope Jake accepted this and moved on in his life, becoming a writer, marrying a Bajoran woman and moving back to Earth. Before Jake left for Earth, Benjamin appeared yet again and they catch up on Jake's life. Distraught, Jake vowed to get his father back and spent the next 20 years working out exactly how to do it. By this time 50 years have passed and Jake hoped that because the wormhole would be inverting again he could grab his father and get him back into synch with his own life. Recreating the accident, Jake is pulled into the limbo that Ben has been stuck in for 50 years. In this time Ben finds out that Jake has lost his wife, stopped writing, and has dedicated his life to getting him back. Distressed, Ben makes Jake promise to get his life back. Pulled back into our time Jake knows he has probably lost his father. Back in the present, the woman asks why he didn’t go back to writing and Jake reveals that he has. And that there isn’t enough time left for him, that he was dying. Now morning, the woman leaves and promises to enjoy life and Jake smiles resting in an old chair. After a while he falls asleep and is awakened by Ben and they have a bittersweet reunion. Jake explains that there isn’t enough time, that he will be dead soon from poison. He explains that the sync was like a rubber band. He was the anchor for his father. Sometimes the band would be pulled taut and during those times before the tension was released Ben would temporarily rejoin our time but pulled away again once it snapped back. Once Jake died Ben would be lost in limbo forever. The only way to save him was to cut the cord at the time its most taut, when he was in perfect synch with our time. If he did so Benjamin would be shot back to the time of the incident and he could jump out of the way before he got caught in the loop. Benjamin watches his son die in front of him and is slingshot back to the original incident and dives out of the way pushing Jake on the ground as well, saving them both from the fate that would take away both their lives. Memorable Quotes "You are my favorite author of all time." "You should read more." : - Melanie and the adult Jake Sisko "It begins, many years ago. I was eighteen. And the worst thing that could happen to a young man happened to me. My father died." : - the adult Jake Sisko "I'm no writer; but if I were, it seems to me I'd want to poke my head up every once in a while and take a look around; see what's going on. It's life, Jake! You can miss it if you don't open your eyes." : - Benjamin Sisko "I'm not sure I could ever get over losing somebody like that; right in front of my eyes." "People do. Time passes, and they realize that the person they lost is really gone... And they heal" "Is that what happened to you?" "No... I suppose not." : - Melanie and adult Jake Sisko "Benjamin Sisko was more than my commanding officer; he was the emissary to my people sent by the prophets. But most importantly, he was my friend." : - Kira Nerys, at the memorial for Benjamin Sisko "I didn't step forward. I couldn't. I felt that no matter what I said about him, I'd be leaving so much more out; and that didn't seem right." : - Adult Jake Sisko, to Melanie "Please don't make me leave; not yet. This is my home. When my dad and I came here, this place was just an abandoned shell. He turned it into something. Everywhere I look, it's like I see a part of him. If I leave, I won't have anything left of him. : - Jake Sisko, responding to Kira's request that he leave the station "Quark finally got that little moon he was always talking about, and my father, as usual, is making sure it doesn't fall out of orbit." : - Nog, to Jake as adults "And don't think because I'm not around much, that I don't ''want grandchildren." : - '''Benjamin Sisko', to Jake just before disappearing "Let go, Jake. If not for yourself, then for me. You still have time to make a better life for yourself. Promise me you'll do that... Promise me!" :- Benjamin Sisko, imploring Jake to let him go "To my father, who's coming home." :- Benjamin Sisko reads the dedication in Jake's last book "For you, and for the boy that I was. He needs you more than you know. Don't you see? We're going to get a second... chance." : - Jake Sisko explains himself to his father with his last words. Background Information *According to most staff on the show, this was one of the best Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes they worked on. It should also be noted that Avery Brooks and Cirroc Lofton cite this as one of their favorite episodes, along with "Far Beyond the Stars". Many fans of Deep Space Nine have also counted this among their favorite episodes. *Rachel Robinson, who played old Jake's visitor, is Andrew Robinson's (Elim Garak) daughter. *Jake later actually writes "Anslem", under Onaya's influence later in the season, in "The Muse". *It is interesting to note that the Dominion War did not happen (as of the 2390s anyway) in the alternate timeline. Nog states that "I think they (the Klingons) were happy to have us test the waters in the Gamma Quadrant after all these years - find out how the Dominion would react to ships coming through". *Future uniforms and combadges worn in this episode were reused from "All Good Things". *Similar to the later ''Enterprise'' episode "Twilight", this is a sort of "bad dream" episode, in that the plot resolution prevented the main part of the story from occuring. However, because Jake continued to write, it is still entirely possible that Melanie will become a fan of his in the main timeline. * Melanie would later appear in the framing story of the Prophecy and Change anthology. Links and References in the alternate reality future]] Guest Stars * Tony Todd as the adult Jake Sisko * Galyn Görg as Korena Sisko * Aron Eisenberg as Nog * Rachel Robinson as Melanie Co-Stars *Majel Barrett as the computer voice * Mark Allen Shepherd as Morn (uncredited) References 47; Anslem; Bajoran; Bajoran sector; Bajoran wormhole; Bayou; Betar Prize; Bolian; Cardassian; Coffee; Collected Stories; Commander; Danube class; Deep Space 9; ''Defiant'', USS; deflector array; Docking pylon; Dominion; Earth; Engineering; Fall; French Quarter; Gamma Quadrant; gravimetric field; graviton pulse; Klingon; Klingon Empire; Klingon High Council; latinum; interphasic compensator; ion surfing; Louisiana; moon; muse; New Orleans; Pennington School; Promenade; Prophets; Quark's; redfish; Replicator; Sickbay; Sisko's Creole Kitchen; slug; subspace flux isolator; Starfleet; Starfleet Command; Starfleet Science; subspace; subspace inversion; Takarian mead; United Federation of Planets; warp core; Warp core breach; warp core ejection system; warp coil |next= }} Visitor, The de:Der Besuch es:The Visitor nl:The Visitor